Friday 30th December, 2016 at 11:20am
Having seen his side shoot up the table from bottom to sixth in the space of a week, Alan Archibald was quite rightly in a buoyant mood when he spoke to ptfc.co.uk ahead of Saturday’s clash with Kilmarnock.
He said: “What a difference a week makes! We had two tough games but we came away with six massive points and we’re delighted with that. We’ve had a lot of games this month and have played the very best teams that this league has to offer, but we’ve come through it strongly. We’ve had some really good performances and have come away without any major injury concerns, which is a big bonus.
“Liam Lindsay had to go off after he took a bang to the face on Wednesday night – he got a bang there last week too so it was a bit of a re-occurrence of that. We’ll assess him in the run up to the Killie game and take it from there.”
Thistle’s spell at the bottom of the league was well publicised but back to back wins have made the table look much more favourable for the Maryhill men. There’s no room for complacency in Archibald’s approach though, particularly given how tight the league remains going into the New Year.
“The way our fixtures panned out this year has meant we have had a couple of runs of really tough fixtures which didn’t help with our position earlier in the season. A couple of back to back wins makes a massive difference though and you can see that in the league table.
“The whole team is going into Saturday with a much greater level of confidence but we certainly won’t be getting complacent because we know that if we don’t win and other teams do then that points gap will evaporate very quickly. There’s a huge incentive for us to open up a gap on those underneath us. It’s a really key period for us but we’re at home and the onus is very much on us to go and get the three points.
“We’ve tried to keep the mentality of the boys good, even when the results weren’t coming. We have played well and probably haven’t got the results that those performances have deserved at times.”
Thistle managed to keep a clean sheet against Dundee in midweek – the team’s first shutout since October when they beat the same opposition by the same scoreline.
“We were really pleased with the clean sheet because it was well deserved and we worked hard to remain resilient right until the last minute. I think we probably deserved a clean sheet up in Dingwall but conceded in the later stages of the game, but Wednesday will be a big confidence boost to the defence and goalkeeper who definitely deserved it.
“The squad are in a good place just now and we’ll be taking everything we can into the game against Kilmarnock. They obviously had a disappointing result in the week but we know that they can be a good side so we’ll need to be at our very best to take all three points. Our performances have been good recently and now the results are starting to come too, we want to keep that going so there will be no complacency here.”
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